...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead
Live Backstage @ Monaco 09.05.02

The Vue start, sixties rock, nice reverberated voice, nice hairstyles. It's hot in the backstage. I go out for a cigarette. I see Michael Mittermaier (German comedian like Paolo Rossi). I prefer listening to him than watching the concert. He’s taller than on TV. He doesn't crack jokes, tries not to be noticed, and talks with friends. Interesting.

The Clinic from Liverpool follow, dressed as surgeons. I go in immediately. Mystery. They sing through operating room masks. They seem like Devo with Brian Molko's voice. They even play a clarinet (something I saw ages ago by Adi Newton's Clock DVA) and Casio keyboards amplified by microphones. I go out for another cigarette.

The Trail of Dead start, they are boring, they keep swapping instruments continuously: in my boredom, I have time to think that the prevailing guitarist/singer is also the best drummer while the prevailing drummer sings poorly and barely plays the guitar, desperately searching for each chord with his eyes, and jumps and shouts with too much pathos. Screams from the head like the others: badly. At the end, they talk about a bottle of whiskey. Then a Jack Daniels appears from the wings; the prevailing drummer then functioning as a singer takes a sip, passes it to the audience but then immediately asks for it back. Amateur him and the front rows. Go to bed.

They have only good song fragments, good starts, the rest is all the same; they create tension by starting slowly, then explode and calm down again: the chords are always the same and the three-note circles as well, we only recognize “Mistakes And Regrets” from “Madonna”, the only composition with a meaningful text, the rest are mediocre half-sentences like “Jesus died for somebody’s sins…”, “Your conscience…” and then words blathered incoherently like the compositions of sixteen-year-old teenagers who don’t know English. We think of ourselves as kids. They are from Texas, maybe they only played football.

The Trail can’t play, can’t sing and are a bore. One could pick some ideas here and there and make songs. And let’s be clear that we're not against free form (Loop, Spacemen 3, Shellac, Sonic Youth) but the Trail just make noise, not even well. There’s also an order in chaos, and there must be. Ah, in the end, the drummer/drummer throws around his drums, carefully avoiding damaging them, not even harming a drum skin. What an impression! What rock'n'roll! If one wants to destroy and self-destruct, one has to do it like Cobain, dive into the cymbals with a five-meter run-up and break an arm. No charisma. A bore. Like a coitus interruptus, great premises, great intentions but then nothing happens.

"And you will know us by the trail of dead".

"And you will know us by the trail of boredom" morelike.

Or by the trail of amateurs.